I went to see A Late Quartet at the weekend at the Duke of Yorks. I picked the film because it had some of my favourite actors in it, namely Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. It was also set in NYC, a place that is dear to my heart at the moment, my brain is busy thinking about future plans for the city. Little did I know the film would be so relevant to so many things in my life right now.

The film centres around 4 musicians who have been playing in a quartet for 25 years. It follows the emotions, battles, compromises and complications between 4 people who have spent those years working so closely together. These feelings are brought to the forefront when one of the quartet becomes ill, and it threatens to pull the quartet apart. I don’t want to give too much of the film away. If you have any relationships in your life, be they work or personal, I highly recommend this film as a way of putting some perspective on them.

There are not many roles that require so much dedication and often compromise as those that exist in the classical music world, especially the quartet. It’s less intensive, but the world of work, business and life also requires dedication and compromise when it comes to the definition of roles and responsibility. For that dedication to continue and not get foggy, there needs to be good communication, and that communication is sometimes difficult. The longer you hold onto something, the greater chance of it becoming a negative and harder to repair.

From Wikipedia - The word symphony is derived from Greek συμφωνία (symphonia), meaning “agreement or concord of sound”.